THIRTEEN 3 page

“I’m gonna kill her.”

“Like father like daughter.”

“That’s not funny.”

The phone rang again. Stein grabbed the receiver off the hook as if he were grabbing Mattingly’s throat. “No warrants! I will BE there!”

“Was that school?” Penelope asked, with her deadpan smile.

FIVE

All the way up Sunset into Bel Air Stein carried on a ferocious inner monologue with Angie: Stein as the biblical God of Vengeance hurling bolts of lightning at the offending nickel bag. Stein as the wounded single parent who had given his daughter trust and respect and been deceived in return. She needed discipline of course, but when he trawled back through his own childhood memories for clues of how to dispense it, he came back empty. His own father had been generally tolerant of him from a safe distance, but had never waded through the waters of adolescent fury or attempted to run the gauntlet that led to the heart. Stein senior had been recalled by the cosmic manufacturer with a defective fuel pump after just forty‑nine thousand miles. Maybe that was why it felt so weird to Stein, turning fifty. Outdistancing his ancestor made him feel ancient and unprotected with no one out in front blocking the wind.

It was in this agitated frame of mind that Stein drove up the circular driveway of the bastion of smug privilege called The Academy. The white stucco archways, the rolling hillsides of well‑mown lawns, the sixteen‑year‑old kids in their forty thousand‑dollar convertibles, the nannies waiting in their employers’ Range Rovers, as though their employers ever roved a range‑it was like going to a resort. “Club Ed,” Stein called it, when he and Hillary argued. He half expected to see an old Negro waiter in a red jacket and white gloves come bustling over the hillside with a rum drink on a tray.

“Hey, Dad.”

Angie and her two girlfriends sauntered over. Elyssa, tall, rail‑thin, a dancer, and Megan, a vivacious redhead who knew every 18‑year‑old boy on the West Side. And Angie, her genetics still locked too tightly in the divorce wars for Stein to see her clearly. He recognized too much of himself in her sharp, protective sense of humor, in the ways she contrived not to be an outsider. He wondered if his own desperate needs were so inadequately camouflaged.

“Get in,” Stein said, making no attempt to be cordial. He heard one of her friends say “uh‑oh,” but Angie would not give him the satisfaction of hurrying. She hugged each of her friends, made plans for later, deliberately extending the moment before finally climbing into the back seat, leaving Stein to drive like a chauffeur.

“That was rude,” she said.

“What about sitting in the back? Is that rude?”

She mouthed something unintelligible.

“We’ll have plenty to talk about it when we get home. I promise you that.”

“Whatever.”

They drove in silence. Stein occasionally glanced into the rearview mirror to see the effects of his siege. But she had her earphones plugged in, and was no more affected by his feeble sanctions than a sand crab is by the fluctuations of light on Jupiter.

Penelope Kim’s door flew open the moment she saw Stein and Angie walking up the courtyard. “I solved it,” she exclaimed. “Do you want to hear?”

“Not right now, ok?” He tried not to break stride.

“I changed the Morty Greene character to a woman. But everything else is the same.”

“She’s a six foot nine inch woman?”

“You are so linear. Do you want to know why the bottles get stolen?”

“Yes, but later.”

He fumbled to find the right key.

“The shampoo is just incidental. It’s the bottles! This is the packaging generation. As long as people think they have Espe, that’s all that matters.”

He got the door open and pointedly prevented Penelope from coming in. “Later, ok?”

Angie dumped her backpack and jacket over Stein’s desk and tromped into the kitchen. “How come there’s never any food here?” she peered disdainfully into the refrigerator.

“There’s cheese, there’s apples. I got Fujis, the kind you like. There’s bread. There’s pasta. We have to talk.”

“I like Galas, not Fujis.”

“Last time I got Galas; you told me you wanted Fujis.”

“No. Last time you got Fujis.”

“What’s the difference? They all taste good when you have the munchies.”

Everything stopped for a moment. He had taken her by surprise. And himself even more. There was no retreating now.

“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked with hostile nonchalance.

“It means I found your stash.”

Her face went through the gamut of adolescent response. From shock through denial and outrage, to defiant attack. “That’s a real invasion of privacy. Going through my things.”

“The air duct is not your things.”

“It’s not even mine anyway. I’m holding it for someone.”

“Oh, that’s original.”

“Believe what you want.”

“What I want is the truth.”

“No, what you want is some kind of parental fantasy.”

“How’d you even get it in there? That shelf weighs a ton.”

“You see? That proves it’s not mine. And what were you doing anyway, prowling around the‑?”

The phone rang. “Leave it,” Stein ordered. He was too late.

“Hello? Yes, he’s right here.” She handed Stein the phone. “It’s Ma.”

Stein held the receiver against his shirt. “We’re not through talking about this.”

Angie took the stairs three at a time. Stein uncovered the receiver and said hello in his talking‑to‑Hillary voice. He was annoyed to hear Penelope Kim on the other end, and irked at Angie for tricking him. “You’re being a pain in the ass now, Penelope. I will call you when I can.”

“I’ll let that go because I’m large of spirit and you’d regret saying something so unkind to me. I’m calling to tell you that the most beautiful woman in the world is about to knock on your door.”

“Don’t, Penelope.”

“I don’t mean me, but thanks.”

A moment later Stein heard the click of approaching heels, then a brief pause followed by a tap on his door and a voice as soft as Georgia twilight speak his name. He swung the door open, on guard against whatever potential loveliness that might be waiting there to deter him from his parental task. But even Penelope’s warning did not prepare Stein for the shock to his system caused by the intimate presence of such absolute, unadorned beauty. Her eyes were green and vibrant and not afraid to meet his eyes, which fled from her gaze like a squirrel from a fire. She wore a soft white blouse open at the neck, a sixties style peasant skirt and boots. Her hair was the color of a fiery sunset. She offered her hand, which he took. Her skin had an extra dimension of life. “My name is Nicholette Bradley,” she said. “I believe you know a friend of mine.”

Stein was in near total hypnosis. Still he managed a passable opening line. “That couldn’t be possible because if I knew a friend of yours I would know about you. And if I knew you for even ten seconds longer than I already do, I would have asked you to marry me.” He counted down without missing a beat. “Nine, eight, seven…”

“I’m Brian Goodpasture’s friend.”

“Ah.” The countdown aborted and he released her appendage.

“I wonder if you’d mind making me a cup of tea.” Before he realized that meant she might want to come inside, she had stepped inside. Upstairs, Angie’s stereo amped out a Tori Amos CD, her plaintive voice tobogganing through octaves of tortured love.

“Forgive the mess. I have a teenager.”

Nicholette moved familiarly through the roomscape as though she had been here many times. Stein became aware of how a person who never met him would perceive the place and the person who lived in it. She found the chair in the breakfast nook where Angie had splayed her books out that morning. “Is this all right?”

“Anywhere you’re comfortable. He bustled past her into the kitchen, there rifled through the cabinet above the counter. “I have mint, chamomile, English Breakfast, licorice.”

“Or actually, juice would be fine if you have it.”

“I think so.” Stein knelt at the open refrigerator door, giving Nicholette ample time to come up behind him, drape her arms languidly over his neck, press her breasts against his back, envelop him in the chrysalis of her stupendously luxuriant hair, if that had been any part of her reason for coming here.

“Boysenberry‑apple OK?”

“That’s fine.”

He brought the juice to the table and watched her lips engage with the glass, part slightly to allow the fortunate liquid to pass through, and followed its pilgrimage along the furrow of her tongue down through the shimmer of tiny convulsions below her chin. She put her glass down after a sip and got to her business.

“Brian’s disappeared,” she said.

He immediately wished that his response had been more clever than “What?”

“He called me right after he left you this morning. We made plans to meet at noon for lunch. He never arrived.”

“That was just a few hours ago. Why would you think he’s disappeared?”

“He’s extremely punctual. At twelve‑fifteen, when he hadn’t arrived, I called him in his car. Then at home. Then on his pager. Then at another private number. I tried them all again at ten minute intervals for an hour. I called friends who always know his whereabouts. As far as I can tell, you were the last person who saw him.”

“Miss Bradley, I‑”

“Call me Nikki, please.” Her fingertips grazed his forearm. The feeling that went through him transcended any trivial concern about whether the act was unconscious or contrived. He would happily live forever in that state of ecstatic anticipation.

“He’s lucky to have someone that cares so much about him,” Stein managed to say. “But I’m sure he’s fine. Why shouldn’t he be?”

“You’re right. Nobody in the world ever died.”

Stein carefully modulated his voice so that its amplitude would not travel upstairs. “Do you think he may have died?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

“Maybe you ought to go to the police.”

“You know Brian’s business.”

“Still. Death trumps weed.”

“He was sure you were going to change your mind. He said if you saw a person in need you would never turn her away. Do you see a person in need here, Mister Stein?”

All of his instincts surged forward to say yes. He could feel the tectonic grinding of his internal plates, knowing that he would have to refuse.

“The thing is, I don’t see how I could really help. I don’t know his friends or anything about him. I wouldn’t know where to look, who to call. I don’t know what I could add.”

“If there was something very simple, very specific you could add, would you help?” He came close to touching her hand. He touched the neck of the juice glass.

“What would that be?”

“Would you drive with me to his house?”

Her request was so disarmingly small, calling only for an act of the most basic chivalry and kindness. He made a lame gesture of apology citing the sounds from upstairs. “I’m sorry. I just can’t get away.”

She took a card from her purse, wrote some numbers on the back and handed it to him. The card was a miniature cover of Vogue magazine, with an incredibly sexy photograph of her. “I hope Brian didn’t misjudge you,” she said.

Stein stood in his open doorway breathing in the wake of aroma that trailed behind Nicholette as she runway‑strode beneath the arbor of bougainvillea out of the courtyard to the street. The feeling recalled looking up at the comet Hale‑Bopp the last evening it would be visible after its month‑long sojourn across the western sky, and the inexplicable ache of nostalgia he had felt knowing that he would never see its light again. Nicholette had written Goodpasture’s phone numbers on the back of the card along with her address. Stein had a strong impulse to call him. But that would have to wait until after Round Two with Angie. He climbed the stairs toward her door, which was half open. Tori Amos was still playing and an I Love Lucy rerun was on TV. Angie was sprawled out on her bed amongst books and clothes, talking on the phone.

“I thought you were supposed to be studying.”

“I am studying.”

“We need to talk.”

“Fine. Whatever.”

“Would you mind? His gesture implied that she turn off the distractions.

“I multi‑task.”

He waited. And ultimately she hung up, logged out, turned off.

“Tell me about the weed.”

“Who was that woman?

“Nobody. A friend of a friend.”

“Are you dating her?”

“The weed, Angie.”

“You should marry Lila.”

“Lila is a friend not a girlfriend. This conversation is about you.”

“Of course I’ve smoked it. Who hasn’t? It’s not that big a deal.”

“It’s not that big a deal? Is that what you’re saying?”

“If you knew what other people at school were doing.”

“This is not about other people.”

“But if you knew.”

“If I knew I’d be terrified.”

“You’d be glad all I was doing was smoking weed.”

“I’m not just glad I’m thrilled.”

She made that face that said how much longer into the century do you plan for this to go on?

“As long as we’re being honest, Angie, do you smoke regularly?”

“As long as we’re being honest, do you?”

“Do I?”

She was giggling at him now. “Mom showed me some of the pictures of you in your hippie days.” She grabbed her backpack from the pile of books and clothing and CD boxes on her bed, and after rummaging about in it, found the black‑and‑white photo she’d been hunting for. “How could you think a beard and a pony tail looked cool?” She draped her arms over his shoulders while they commiserated over the picture.

“Thanks for the Kodak moment. But it doesn’t answer my question.”

“Which is?

“Do you smoke it regularly?”

“It makes me paranoid and hungry. I don’t like it.”

“I wish you had a stronger reason.”

“You mean like ‘Just say no’?”

“If you don’t like it and you don’t smoke it, why do you have it?”

“I told you. I’m holding it for someone.”

“And you promise that is the absolute truth?”

She looked at him balefully.

“Who is it? Who are you holding it for?”

“Right. Like I’m going to tell you.”

“I’d like to know.”

“Then this conversation has come to an end.”

“Do you understand that possession is still a crime in this state?”

“I’ll never let them take you alive, Daddy.”

Walking Watson helped Stein clear his head. Watson was stronger in the afternoons. He could make it down the steps unassisted. His sausage stump of a tail had been a barometer of his personality all his life, pointing straight up as though broadcasting good news to Mars. But last year he had run out into the street and been knocked unconscious by the axle of the mail truck. Though he had recovered most of his functions, he had aged from a fifteen year‑old pup to an old dog whose tail was now locked in the permanent down position like it was dousing for water. Stein had always considered Watson to be a four‑legged repository of his own spirit, and seeing him so depleted weighed heavily upon him.

Nicholette’s visit had left Stein unsettled. He thought of himself as the retired gunslinger in the Western movies who goes out to the barn late at nights while his wife and kids are asleep and unwraps the old Colt. 45 from the creche where he has carefully swathed it in bunting and fur, feeling its heft and weight in his hand, remembering its dangerous, seductive power, but also the promises he made to people who depended on his being alive, and then returning it to its hiding place, along with another tiny little piece of himself.

When Stein mentally replayed the stream of condescending replies he had made to Nicholette he did not feel like a western hero. He felt like an idiot. He wished that someone from the Ministry of Pompous Assholes had come and shoved a pie in his face‑ a service he had performed during his youth to many others who deserved it.

“You ought to clean up after your pet.”

The morally superior voice of a neighbor, a deputy sheriff in the Environment posse, brought Stein back into now. Watson had squirted out a squalid little dump onto a patch of new grass. “What are you feeding him?” she added.

“He’s old. Cut him some slack.”

“I wasn’t blaming him.”

Naturally, Stein had neglected to bring the little baggies, the latest industry to thrive on America’s obsession with early toilet training. “I have them inside,” he muttered. He scooted Watson back into the house and came back out with a baggie, fully intending to perform his civic duty. But when he saw the woman still standing there, marking the spot, he could not give her the satisfaction of having puppeteered him. Before getting to the sidewalk he diverted from his path and knocked on Penelope Kim’s door. She lived on the other side of the horseshoe from Stein. Their front doors faced each other across a center courtyard dominated by a tall banyan tree.

“Go away,” she pouted from inside. “I’m writing.”

“I thought today was a thinking day.”

She came to the door wearing slim running shorts and a tank top that clung to her like tracing paper. “I hate when you do this to me, Stein.”

“Do what?”

“Make me beg.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Nicholette Bradley has been gone for eleven minutes and you haven’t told me a word.”

“How do you know her name?”

“God. Stein. Do you not exist in the modern world? Have you not seen the last fifty covers of Cosmo and Vogue?”

Vogue. Stein pulled Nicholette’s card out of his shirt pocket. Now the picture made sense.

“Oh my God. Is that what she smells like?” Penelope plucked the card out of Stein’s hand and filled her chest with a long Zen breath, one nostril at a time. Stein realized that he had been breathing in that perfume too and was still partially intoxicated.

“She wants to sleep with you, doesn’t she?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“You underestimate your power.”

Music emanated from Angie’s bedroom across the courtyard. Stein felt drawn to obligation. “I should get back.”

“Are you still menstruating about her weed? You should send her to Paris, Stein. Let her live on her own for a while. Tend bar. Be an artist’s model. It would be good for her. Good for both of you.”

“That’s so interesting! Her mother keeps suggesting precisely that.”

“Her mother has your balls in a bolo.”

“Why don’t you give Klein a teenage daughter? So I can read it as an instructional manual.”

“You say that as a joke.”

“Tell me what he does when his daughter forgets her father’s fiftieth birthday.”

“Stein, is it your birthday? Is that why you’re depressed?”

“I’m not depressed.”

“Oh my God! Of course you’re a Sag. How could I not have known that?”

Penelope wrangled him inside and sat him down on one of her silky, cushiony arrangements. Her entire apartment was white. White walls, white curtains, white lampshades, white silk room dividers, white lilies in a white porcelain vase on a white obelisk. She knelt behind him and told him to close his eyes.

“I have to clean up Watson’s‑”

“Shh.”

Her fingertips on his temples felt like butterfly wings that sent sparks of electricity through him. He wondered if being attracted to a bisexual meant that he was partially gay. “Being old is cool,” Penelope murmured. Her fingertips manipulated his scalp through the short grey hair. “My high‑school teacher told me that it takes a man until he’s fifty to realize that his penis is not a weapon but a baton.”

“Your high‑school teacher told you that?”

She was past that and already on to the next thing. “Stein, you just gave me the perfect idea for Klein. The killers use his daughter as bait knowing that he can’t help trying to rescue her. She’s his kryptonite. That’s how they get him.”

“What do you mean, get him?”

“You know, kill him.”

“The character you’re modeling on me dies?”

“It’s the perfect existential ending, Stein. He’s so sixties. Which are so over.”

There was a thump and a loud crash from across the courtyard.

“Angie!”

Stein catapulted off Penelope’s cushions and out her door. Across the courtyard, Stein’s door was wide open. He bounded across the bed of ivy that grew around the circumference of the banyan tree and vaulted up the steps of his landing. “ANGIE!” He bellowed up to the open second story window directly overhead. He grabbed the kryptonite bar lock from his bicycle that rested against the stairs and entered his living room on full alert.

The wooden rack of cassette tapes had been knocked over, and plastic boxes littered the floor. His breath came heavily. There was a noise on the staircase. A leg materialized. Followed by a body in a business suit and a beautiful face. Stein looked up at his ex‑wife with a combination of rapidly depleting relief and growing anger. “Hillary?” He allowed his right arm brandishing the iron bar to drop to his side and tried to make his voice sound welcoming, coming not even close. “What are you doing here?”

“I told you. I was taking Angie Christmas shopping tonight and to see The Nutcracker.”

“You never told me that.”

She was uninterested in his protest.

“You never even asked.”

“I told Angie to tell you.”

Nitrogen bubbles popped in Stein’s brain. He spoke so civilly he thought his teeth would pulverize. “We agreed not use Angie as a go‑between, Hillary. Does this conversation ring a bell? We agreed we would make all parental arrangement directly with each other.”

“Are you going to hold me hostage to every word I say?”

“Do you mean are you accountable for what you say? YES! We call that being an adult. Setting an example to our child about integrity.”

“Don’t spar with me Harry, I’m too tired to pull my punches.”

“Anyway, you can’t take her to The Nutcracker tonight. We have plans.”

Angie clomped down the steps at that moment. “What plans? We don’t have any plans,”

“Well we should,” he grouched. “It’s my damn birthday.” He turned on Hillary. “You should have told her. I remind her when it’s yours.”

Angie shot Stein a look of pity and mortification a parent never wants to see from his child. “Is that why you’ve been acting so weird today? You thought I forgot your birthday?”

“Don’t make it worse by pretending.”

Angie strode with purpose to the linen closet, tossed aside the blankets and pillowcases where Stein had momentarily contemplated hiding Goodpasture’s birthday bud, then marched back to him brandishing a festively wrapped parcel. “Do you and Watson not have the same birthday?” she demanded. “Does this not prove I remembered?” She tore apart the folds of red and blue tissue paper and thrust the inner contents at Stein. It was a package of twelve rawhide chewies. She knelt and nuzzled Watson. “You see Watsie, I know it’s your special day.”

“I am humbled in ways I cannot describe,” Stein said.

“Why are you still here, anyway? I thought you had gone to the airport to pick up Lila.”

Stein blanched. “Is that tonight?”

“Duh..”

He rummaged through a pile of yellow Post‑Its stuck to his desk calendar and found the note he was looking for. “Oh God.” He looked pleadingly at the clock, whose face was as unforgiving as Hillary’s. “She’s going to think I forgot.”

“You did forget.”

“But you know her. She’s going to think it’s because she’s not important enough to remember.” He grabbed his wallet and keys, leapt down the four steps, turned his ankle and very nearly went sprawling, recovered and waved back over his shoulder that he was ok as he stumbled toward his car.

“That’s your father,” Hillary said, “always chasing the six o’clock plane at six forty‑five.”

At the curb, Stein’s neighbor was still eyeing the offending brown blotch.

Traffic on the southbound 405 was tighter than a spastic colon. Stein juked and jived between lanes making up a car length then losing it back. He visualized Lila sitting alone at Baggage Claim, watching the last unclaimed duffel make its five hundredth orbit around carousel. If wishing made it true, he would wish that he loved Lila. Angie was right. She was the perfect woman for him. Goofy and dependable, smart and practical, she had an appreciation of life’s fragility and a batty sense of humor. She had been her second husband’s second wife. They had had seven good years, then cancer. When the bad end came, it was Lila and not his first wife who changed her husband’s bandages and washed him. It was Lila holding his hand as his life ebbed from it, even when his own teenage son and daughter could not. The one deficit that negated all her strong qualities was her obvious poor judgment. She was in love with Stein.

Ninety minutes late, Stein ran raggedly into the United Airlines baggage claim area. Lila was sitting on her suitcase, wearing her red Versace business suit, reading Cosmopolitan.

“Good! You’re still here,” he gasped.

“Good I’m still here? No, it’s not good that I’m here. It’s pathetic. If I had any self‑respect I would be home in a hot bath drinking a glass of Merlot.”

“You wouldn’t believe the traffic.”

“You forgot. You can admit it.”

“I absolutely did not forget! In fact, I’ve been making trial runs all week to see which was the best route.”

“I called your house. They told me you just left.”

“I’m a shit,” Stein conceded.

“But you’re an old shit and you need some pity.” She handed him a neatly wrapped little package. “Happy birthday. And thanks for coming up with a really nice lie. I still want to believe it.”

She watched hopefully as Stein opened the box. It was the soundtrack to Woodstock II. “Angie told me you’d like it.”

He nodded yes. “My girls.”

D RIVING NORTHBOUNDED on the 405, Stein was concentrating on eleven different things other than driving, so he didn’t see the sixteen‑wheeler lumbering into the same lane from the left that he was entering from the right. The blast of its air horn practically lifted his car off the road. Its huge form filled his field of view like an iceberg. He lurched blindly to the right, hit the gas hard, found himself going straight at the median. Lila screamed. Stein hit the brake, skidded and jounced across the steel nubs implanted into the road. The wind draft made the Camry fishtail. The bottom corner of the MERGE LEFT sign sheared off his outside mirror. The truck never slowed. A second blast of its horn dopplered out behind it like a lingering fuck you. Heart pounding, Stein pulled to the shoulder and asked Lila if she was ok.

“Am I ok? No, I’m not ok. Look at me.” Her voice was tweeting in its upper register. She had been thrown sideways in her seat and her wide brimmed hat knocked askew along with her equilibrium. “If you have a death wish, it’s proper etiquette to let your passenger know ahead of time.”

“Sorry.”

He started up again and drove slowly on surface streets away from the freeway. He was more lightheaded than he realized from the adrenaline rush. He made a few exploratory turns that took them into dark and unfamiliar territory. Lila noticed his uncertainty. “I presume you know where you’re going,” she said.

“By presume, you mean you hope and wish?”

“Can you drive without your mirror?”

“Who needs hindsight?”

A water tower rose silently out of the darkness; it looked vaguely familiar to Stein and he realized exactly where he was. He had never approached the Espe warehouse from this direction, from the far side of the Ballona Wetlands. He remembered that he had forgotten to follow up with Mattingly about the whole Morty Greene arrest warrant thing and a bad sound emanated from his throat.

“Are we lost?”

He had nearly passed the driveway when he jerked the wheel and careened into a skidding turn.

“Jesus, Stein! Where did you learn to drive?”

“There’s a thing I have to do here. It’ll only take a second.”

“Here? Where is here?”

“Do you mind?”

“Like I have a vote.”

He punched his security code into the electronic box at the side of the gate and the wooden barrier arm rose in salute. He came to a hard stop at the glass‑doored entrance.

“Do you want to wait here or come in?” He decided for her. “I’ll just be a second.”

He jumped out of the car and entered the warehouse unchallenged. The outer door was open. The security guard’s desk was unoccupied. A game show played on the portable TV alongside the four‑inch monitor. It would take a real criminal mastermind to steal anything out of here, Stein thought. Down the hallway leading to the executive offices there were framed posters of the previous years’ magazine and billboard ads. The girl was clean cut and heartbreakingly beautiful. Her hair looked too perfect to be human. Except now that Stein had met Nicholette Bradley, he recognized that she was the girl in the photographs. She was the Espe New Radiance Girl.